Facebook changes up the Newsfeed

In the world of social media changes are always taking place. Social media platforms are always coming up with better ways to help page managers, advertisers and readers. Facebook always seems to be changing up their strategy to get content to readers, and recently updated the “types” of posts it will allow pages to promote.

Faster Links

The latest change in Facebooks newsfeed will be increasing distribution of certain links to people more often. Facebook will be rewarding links that lead to faster loading web pages. Facebook will also be rewarding links that are using the Instant Article format.

Unfortunately, this will be impacting leads to links that load more slowly. This change will start to take place over the next couple of months, so that pages and publishers can have time to make adjustments.

Instant Articles

The format for Instant Articles was designed to make reading new stories better for users, and specifically mobile users. It essentially strips out extra code that slows mobile web pages down. It can also limit the number of ads that they can display.

Instant articles, while they seem like a good idea, have seen some push back. Some publishers have felt that instant articles have decreased their ability to generate revenue from their own websites. Recently Facebook has listened to some of the publishers, and started to fix some of the problems they’re having. It’s started to let instant Articles show more ads, and restored subscription options to show on articles. In the future, it might even start to test page likes, email sign up buttons and paid subscription paywall features.

To be clear, Facebook has not announced that Instant Articles will be directly benefitting from this change, but given the restrictions coming forward on non-instant articles, it appears that they will benefit.

Facebook will be analyzing the load time of a webpage, that it takes when someone clicks on a link in their newsfeed. But don’t worry: it will also be taking into consideration the specific users’ speed along with the general speed of web pages in question.

Take Away

There’s no reason to panic, but in the future when these changes are eventually rolled out, slower web pages can expect to see a change. If pages continue to load slowly, they will be sure to see a decreased flow of traffic from posts on social media, as Facebook won’t be prioritizing them. While it may seem unfair punishment to slower sites, Facebook isn’t the only problem you have. If your site is loading slowly, chances are you’re already losing out to other traffic from other sources.